Employee Onboarding the Right Way

With the speed of business today, it’s easy to get lost in survival mode, tirelessly working to keep up with the day-to-day demands of the job. HR professionals understand that businesses survive and thrive on great talent that is engaged and productive. The constant flow of recruiting, hiring, training, and evaluating is a required cycle that feeds the life-blood of any organization.

After expending so much energy recruiting a candidate, don’t let the difficulties of onboarding become a barrier to producing revenue from your placements. A strong onboarding process will foster a positive experience and create long-lasting value for your organization in the form of longer tenures, increased referrals, and both top and bottom line growth.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, but there are a few things we’ve learned that can help.

ONBOARDING IS ONBOARDING…NOT TRAINING

A study of 264 new employees published in the Academy of Management Journal found that the first 90 days of employment is pivotal to an employee’s decision on whether he or she will remain with the company long-term.

The first 90 days are a time for a new hire to receive support and direction from HR, management, and executive leadership. When support levels are high from the team and leaders, new employees had more positive attitudes about their job and role.

TRAINING IS TRAINING…NOT ONBOARDING

It’s important to understand the difference between onboarding and training. These two words are often used interchangeably, however, they carry different functions. Training can sit within the onboarding process, but focuses on the actual development of the employee’s skill and job productivity.

Michel Falcon, founder of Experience Academy says, “Employee onboarding is the design of what your employees feel, see and hear after they have been hired. Often, companies confuse onboarding with training. While training does have a role within the onboarding it doesn’t represent the entire scope of the process.”

A truly effective program can tackle onboarding and beyond, not only assuring compliance and consistency in the process of bringing on a new employee, but also making sure that he or she receives the training needed to be successful on the job.

BALANCE IS KEY

According to a CareerBuilder report, 60% of employees feel that skills will be learned on the job, but 49% of employers feel that training is an equal responsibility of employees and employers.

The main reason employees leave a job is because of issues with management, and it’s easy to find the friction between most employee-management relationships:

Only 39 percent of companies establish milestones and set goals for new employees. (Allied)

Combine the 3 above stats, and we can deduce that a new employee enters a new job thinking he’ll be trained while on the job. Yet, a large percentage of companies don’t clearly identify expectations or provide clear job responsibilities. Additionally, very few companies actually measure productivity.

Training is critical to the engagement and productivity of an employee. Additionally, it’s also critical to the relationship between employee and management.

One of the great ways to balance the onboarding process with training is by providing a mentor. A mentor provides direction for a new employee. He or she can serve as an initial liaison between the employee and leadership, overseeing the cultural immersion of the employee, as well as supplementing his or her training.

Through our PRYDE platform, we are able to both train an employee, and measure her productivity. When combined with the human touch of a mentor, this becomes a powerful tool for you and your company.

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

As technology advances and new employees enter the workforce, it’s important to give your company the competitive advantage that it needs to recruit, hire, train, and retain top talent. Doing onboarding the right way gives you the greatest chance of success with your employees now, and into the future.

David LaMontagne is the Manager of Core Technology at Essium, a premiere software company that has developed an army of intelligent software robots to automate many tasks to enable consistent and efficient management of your onboarding processes with their compliance platform named PRYDE. Designed to give HR personnel a STRESS-FREE onboarding experience, PRYDE helps assimilate new employees and retain personnel long-term.